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Rally ’round the Colbert and Stewart

I’m sure most of you reading this have already heard of the rallies scheduled by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. In case you haven’t, first a bit of history. The impetus for this came from reddit, so they deserve credit: http://www.reddit.com/ I kill a lot of time on reddit and I think you might enjoy it too. One thing I’d like to shine the spotlight on is the redditers stepping up and raising over $200,000 for Colbert’s charity of choice, to persuade Colbert to hold the rally (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/reddit-users-raise-200-000-for-charity-for-colbert-rally/63080/). Even if you dislike Colbert/Stewart/reddit or any combination of the three, you have to admit that is a nice grassroots fundraiser there, and it goes to help teachers do their job.

On to the rallies. Jon Stewart has his “Rally to Restore Sanity” (http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/) and Stephen Colbert has his “March to Keep Fear Alive.” (http://www.keepfearalive.com/) Are these jokes? Their shows are on Comedy Central and deal heavily in satire, so that would argue yes. However, the donations raised argue the opposite, that people are serious about this. I won’t be going because my job is in some jeopardy and I’m carefully considering any extra expenses, but if that wasn’t the case I’d be there. I’ll at least get a t-shirt. There are about 25K people confirmed to go on the facebook pages for both of them, for what that is worth; I’d guess about 50% of those would actually show up.

The question is, why would they be showing up? What are they hoping for? If I was going to be there, my goal would be to hang out with some like-minded people, have a good time, exchange some ideas and hopefully get laid, in no particular order. Noble goals, all! I’m not interested in taking America back because it still belongs to me, just like it did when every other president was in office and every other Congress was in control. You can make a very good argument about the citizens having no power, but this is still my country no matter who is running the show. I’d expect to find a bunch of people who feel the same way, although I’d be lying if I said I thought the crowd wouldn’t skew heavily to the left. I’d just hope it wouldn’t be the lunatic left, which I find just as intolerable as the rabid right. I’d hope that Stewart and Colbert would entertain me for a while and our group would end up on the news, in a positive light. I’d imagine it would be a fun event to attend and something I’d remember fondly for years to come. Short on anger, long on good times.